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I mean sure, eventually, over many down link cycles. But not real time.
Space travel just makes it utterly clear there is on such thing as real time. Computing is constantly running up against the speed of light.
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Why do you think it would be unable to return? I'm curious.
Naively, a round trip requires twice the delta-v, which means you need to launch with a lot more than twice the fuel. Maybe they could produce more fuel and oxidizer in situ, and maybe Earth is a more attractive target for aerocapture, and maybe gravity assists line up better one way or the other, but it's not a bad starting point to assume a round trip is far more expensive than a one-way trip. I'm not sure on what…
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Good point: I seriously wonder if they considered a dirigible design. Buoyancy + directional propulsion does seem simpler in my space-novice opinion compared to a quadcopter. A blimp would be slower than a quadcopter, but nobody's going to be piloting the thing in real time, so that shouldn't matter.
Yes, that was a mission proposal years ago, a blimp and quads. It was not selected then or rehashed this time. In addition, a blimp only concept has been floated (ha!) as well.
It is nice that multiple public sector agencies worldwide are doing space travel now, with the private sector close behind. Relying solely on NASA and the political funding machinations of the White House and Congress would put our understanding of the planets very far behind.
I'm confused by your comment. this is absolutely a NASA mission, subject to all the whims of congress that any other is. APL has long bid on missions and instrument proposals just like other institutions.
NASA likely wouldnt even have revisited this moon without the European probe taking pictures under the atmosphere
It is nice that multiple public sector agencies worldwide are doing space travel now
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In addition to lack of solar energy, I wonder if nuclear power source is necessary to keep batteries or other electronics warm enough to function properly. Conversely, on Titan, we won't need to worry about heat sinks as everything is kept at ~94K in a bath of liquid and frozen methane. Perhaps in a few hundred years AWS's most popular region for intensive compute will be under Titan's methane sea. High spin up cost,…
Hah, I was always intrigued by the idea of placing solar cells on the bright side of Mercury and servers on the dark side. I wonder what other good options might exist in the solar system.
>To protect the hazy moon, engineers deliberately shoved Cassini into Saturn, a gaseous planet incapable of hosting life. Can we be 100% sure there isn't life.
We can be sure that Earthling life wouldn't survive in Saturn, thus posing no threat to hypothetical Saturnian biology.
It's interesting that there is no existing (or planned) launch vehicle that could perform a direct injection for this mission. Getting to Saturn is really, really hard, and without multiple gravity assists from the inner solar system it would be simply impossible. Too bad it results in an 11 year transit time though! Flying direct would save almost 8 years of that...
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Mercury's whisper thin atmosphere won't be much use for cooling anything, though possibly the surface would be. However, the real problem is that Mercury isn't actually tidally locked anyway.
You could have the facility move constantly to keep the facility straddled across the sunlight line. At the equator, this would require constantly moving at about 7 mph, though you could reduce the speed necessary by moving to higher latitudes.
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I find it kind of funny that you think AWS will still be around in a hundred years.
This paper company was founded 771 AD: https://www.shinise.ne.jp/j_kyoto/voices/vol/48/48-d.html It's not even the longest-lived company in the world. This construction company was founded in 578 AD and continuously operated until 2006 when it was bought by a larger company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi 100 years ago was only 1919 -- here are some random companies from 1919 that I found on Wikipedia…
Venus and Titan have in common that probes landing there tend to only operate a few minutes before failing due to the extreme conditions. A helicopter sounds great, but perhaps it would make sense to try to simply make a probe that can stay alive there long enough to do anything other than send a couple pictures back.